Make your small space feel bigger
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What are some initial tips for making a small space feel bigger?
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You want to float furniture? Do you want to float it? Girl, no. No?
No, because what does that even... That is going to look so weird in my place.
Apparently, no. I mean, it's an optical illusion that you actually have a little more square footage if everything's not up against the wall. You can do it like three to five inches. It's not like you put it in the center of your living room. If you go to an open house where they've staged it, you'll notice that they never put all of the furniture up against the wall. They always do it like just a little. It gives you the feeling of more space.
All right, reporter Andy Tegel, coming in straight away with the tips. I'm Arielle Segata, and today on Life Kit, we're talking about how to make a small space feel bigger. Apparently, and I would say counterintuitively, leaving space between your furniture and the wall is one way to do that. We'll see. Maybe I'll try it. I will say I'm in one of those moments with my apartment right now where I'm looking around and I'm like, it's time to change everything. Oh, yeah. Even though I think it's cute, you know, like it's time for a new paint color or it's time for a new couch or whatever. But I think part of that is as my life has changed, I want to use this space for different things. And especially in a small space, one room does have to perform multiple functions.
And then you have to think about like, what is my priority here?
I have a word for you.
How can floating furniture create the illusion of more space?
The word is zoning. And the idea is that you can have even though even if you have just one space, if you have an open floor plan, zoning. Just means like you can zone off different areas of the open floor. There's no reason why you can't have a dining room and a living room and a kitchen and a movie area all in that one open room.
All right. Well, coming up on this episode of Life Kit, we're going to talk more about floating your furniture. We're going to talk about zoning, about floor arrangements, about how to hang your art.
Lots of low budget and non-permanent solutions to make your space your own. That's after the break.
Hundreds of thousands of people came to the U.S. as small children. It's the only home they've ever known. And although they weren't citizens, many got special protections to keep living and working here. Now, though, they find themselves in legal limbo as the Trump administration tightens the screws on immigrants. Listen to NPR's Code Switch podcast in the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.
OK, Andy, what do we need to think about when we're designing small spaces specifically? Like, how's it different when you're trying to make a studio apartment or a one bedroom your own versus a three acre farmhouse or a 10 room mansion? It's a good question.
Let me introduce you to Shamika Lynch. She is the founder and principal designer of Maximizing Tiny Interiors in New Jersey. And her answer was, you know, in a lot of ways, a home is a home is a home. So, you know, people got to cook, people got to work, kids need room to play and do their homework. So a lot is the same. But here's what she says is really essential to the design of small spaces specifically.
No room can be just an extra room. You don't have any extra square footage where it's like, oh, well, that's just going to be decorative. Every single item in your home needs to serve a purpose. And our motto is that everything in your home should work for you. And work is a verb there where you have at least two functions, right? Your living room is probably also functioning as your dining room and also functioning as your playroom. Yeah, you really have to make use of all the space you have.
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